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Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Dont laugh part 3 (the paint)

Paint can really transform something ugly, into something a lot less ugly. I think the paint came out pretty good on this old bike. Its just some white primer and some Rustoleum blue paint, inside is how it went down.

So, first off I needed to take it to the LBS to get the cranks removed, remember? Well, heres a shout-out to MadCat Bicycles because they did the removal for free, thanks guys.

After that, I went to my local ACE hardware, this particular store carries like every spray paint color known to man, so thats really cool----they have a much larger selection than any big orange box kind of store. I narrowed the colors down to a blue, a sage green and a tractor yellow. I already have done 2 bikes in an orange/yellow theme, and the sage looked like maybe it might come out too gray, so i chose the blue. Along with that, I bought a can of white primer. total cost $4.86 (it was on sale).

Then, I bring it home, remove the bottom bracket, and everything else---bb cable guide etc. Everything that you can get off has to be off the frame, it just makes the final product better looking.

This bike had a number of decals, decals are really a large pain in the ass, they usually dont come off well at all, like at all, like they are more durable than the paint theyre attached to. So I learned a trick and burned them off with a propane torch. This worked really well, and left the decals like ash on the frame which was very easy to sand off. Next comes the sanding, you'll want to rough up all the areas of the paint, you dont actually need to take it down to bare metal, its a waste of time if the paint your spraying on is stuck on there really well and not flaking off.

Decal before----note this bike is "team issue"!

Burned decal---

Sand it down well. This bike had a lot of white overspray on it, and i wanted to get most of this off as well. After youre pretty sure you got the bike sanded down well, wipe it down with like an Alcohol product to get all the grease, oils and dust off of the frame. This also allows you to see if youve missed a spot, which I had, so I pulled out the sandpaper again and went over those spots again, thus I had to wipe down again with the alcohol.

Bike before the paint:

After that, you'll want to tape off all the threads and areas you dont want painted. Do a good job here, I made sure i covered the Schwinn headbadge well, cause I wanted that to be there after the paint was done.

Throw down a drop cloth, spray with the primer using a lot of light coats, as opposed to one or two heavy coats of paint. When that dries (about 12 mins) hit it with the final color, in this case blue.

Wait a good amount of time before touching it or trying to assemble parts to it.

And voila, this is what I got when I was done. I think she came out looking pretty good. The parts will be going back on shortly, I also have to find a number of parts still to make her complete----some massive trading is going on with others out there to get what I need.

9 comments:

Normally, I would, but im not going to do it on this build, just to keep the costs down. However, I have ordered custom decals before and have had very good luck with a website called www.vinzdecals.com. They have over 4000 fonts that you can choose to make your custom decal. Price is $9 per sticker though, so not terribly cheap.

Hey! Checked out your project. It's looking good. One thing I've found out in checking many different Criss Cross frames is that they all seem to have inordinantly long top tubes in comparison to the seat tube length. This makes for some interesting builds!

On the decals. I've also had experince with sign companies that do things in vinyl. Many of these companies can take a photgraph or catalog scan of what you want and make a vinyl knock off of it that looks pretty great. You might check that out. Good luck!

My mom bought me a crisscross back in '90 or '91. It was my first "good" bike. I recently resurrected it from storage to do exactly the same project that your doing. Did you ever complete this bike? Any tips?